Damiata crossed herself.
“But in the same way,” I assured her, “Valentino died with his father. He lost the mirror to which he had always returned, whenever he needed to find himself.” This was the Valentino I had witnessed moments before, trying and discarding a thousand masks, desperate to discover who he was. “Yet I believe he always wanted to shatter that glass, because it also reminded him that he was only an image of a man. He had to either steal or destroy the icons of his father’s heart, his own sister and brother. And in the end, he had to send his father Juan’s amulet. Cain’s final offering, after all the victories and conquests had failed to displace his dead brother in his father’s heart, was the proof of his fratricide. As much as he needed the pope’s power and treasury, Valentino had a greater necessity, perhaps even hidden from himself—to lead his father to Ravenna, as you said, to discover the fatal truth.” I cast my eyes over the ghost city that appeared to smolder around me. “And now Valentino has arrived at his own dreadful truth. He could live only as his father’s reflection. Without him, he is a shadow.”
“He is still a dangerous shadow, Niccolò. He will regret letting Giovanni and me go. He will come after us.”
“Yes. I fear so.”
“I have prepared for that.” Damiata put her hand on my arm, as if to comfort me. “You had to give him something, didn’t you, Niccolò? In exchange for sparing Giovanni and me.”
“His resurrection. He knows with all his animal instinct that Fortune has dealt him a fatal blow. If he did not know before tonight, he does now. But he believes I will become his apostle. I alone witnessed the mappa of his ambition and saw how far it extended.” I sighed for the Italy I saw vanishing in smoke, an empire consumed before it ever existed. “And I do believe. Not in him, but in the Italy he created for me. My own empire of hope. In time, I believe I will find the wisdom and courage to describe it. To write those words on the blank parchment he presented me tonight.”
Damiata clutched little Giovanni closer to her before she looked up, her eyes as brilliant as flashes of lightning on the horizon. “More than anything, the Devil requires that we believe in him. But that ensures your family will be safe. Regardless of what you decide.”
I knew at once the choice she meant. I could see only her eyes, yet never had she been so naked before me, not even in the bed we had shared.
Her question was similarly unadorned and guileless: “Will you come with us?”
As often as I had dreamt it, I could not have imagined what it was like to truly hear those words. For the first time I was certain beyond any doubt that Damiata loved me as entirely as I loved her.
And I finally understood this: the only reason I had been unable to see the truth within my own soul was because I had not, until that moment, been able to see the truth in hers. At last, I knew myself. And I knew the answer I would give her.
As did she. She put her finger to my lips. “I know, Niccolò, I know. My darling, I have been places in your soul even you do not yet know. I have seen the man you will be, your profound kindness and deep intellect, your unending courage, the things you will do with your science of men … I have always known what your answer would be. But neither of us would ever know peace unless I had asked.”
“I will never have peace,” I said, hardly able to breathe, already adrift on an endless ocean of regret. “I can only hope that the children of Florence will know peace.”
Damiata’s eyes filled with tears, the perfect mirror of my own. She took my hands but did not embrace me. Yet somehow this clasp was more searing and intimate than our embrace on the hill above.
“My love, I once promised you I would see you again, and Fortune allowed me to keep that trust.” She could not blink quickly enough to keep up with her tears. “But now I must promise you that I will never see you again, not in this life. I must live for my Giovanni, and you for your family and your republic. It is only our souls, which searched for each other all these years, that will never again be parted.”
Here she heaved with a sob and I took her in my arms, although I knew I had also pushed the fatal spear through my heart. I drew in the scent of her hair as if I would never take another breath.
She clung to me as desperately as I clutched her. “Now you must go home, companion of my soul. Be happy with your life and remember your promise to me.” Then she whispered the last words of a life that had to end. Yet through some numbness of the senses and the soul, I did not believe—or refused to believe—that I had heard them.
Nothing in this life of mine has been more painful than standing beneath that ancient arch and letting Damiata go—not even hanging from a rope in the Stinche. When you are tortured, there is eventually a merciful numbness. You welcome your separation from the life you inhabit. At this parting, the very separation from that life—the life I so dearly wished to inhabit forever—was so excruciating I could not hope to survive it.
Yet Damiata herself left me the only possible remedy for my torment. Without looking back, she helped Giovanni onto the saddle in front of one of the riders, then mounted her own horse. The entire party slowly vanished into the mist, as if disappearing into time itself, the fading beat of hooves an echo of a lost empire, a memento of how, inevitably, everything human is reduced to dust and ruins.
Just when it seemed I would lose sight of her entirely, she turned. That was when I heard her final words, whispered within a mind that had mercifully spared them until that moment.
Remember me, my love, even when you reach the far bank of Lethe, even when I am once again only a vague presentiment in your soul. Because I promise you, my dearest, most darling Niccolò, I will find you in the next life.
CHAPTER 30
It is and always was and always will be, that evil follows good, good evil, and the one ever the cause of the other.
History will record that Julius II never appointed Duke Valentino his captain general; instead this warrior pope armored himself with steel rather than faith and led his own armies into the field. With a series of clever lies, Pope Julius contrived to have Valentino imprisoned, taking the maestro of deception entirely unawares. Like the condottieri whom he had outfoxed at Sinigaglia, Valentino could not believe that he would find another man’s word as worthless as his own—particularly as the new pope was well-regarded for his honest dealing. But I believe that Pope Julius, having suffered so much from the sins of the father, understood Rodrigo Borgia’s son as have few other men—and was wise enough not to allow him another opportunity to mirror all Italy’s hopes.
Nevertheless, Valentino continued to battle Fortune for the rest of his life, making desperate attempts to escape his confinement and return to power. At last exiled to Spain, he reached the border fate had set for him three days before the Ides of March, anno Domini 1507, while employed on some minor errand for the King of Navarre. Although he was riding alone, Valentino attacked a party of three armored knights and their many footmen, taking dozens of wounds before he finally gave up his race against time and Fortune.
When considering Valentino’s efforts to conquer Fortuna, one cannot but observe that the very defect of his soul offered him considerable advantage. To kill without hesitation or remorse, to deceive with a skill and ease born of a lifetime of practice, to observe humanity’s hopes and fears with an unnatural keenness—these traits are marvelously suited to a man ambitious for high office and great power. Yet no matter how lofty this rare man’s ascent, he remains enslaved by his own nature. Valentino possessed an intellect far superior to Nero, yet just as the latter was compelled to put on a wig and leave his Golden Palace at night, to risk his own life murdering and robbing his subjects like a gutter-dwelling cutthroat, Valentino condemned himself to live in a foul Labyrinth of deception and cruelty, which he could never escape.
Here it is fair to ask why, knowing Valentino’s true nature as I did, I wrote in The Prince, “I do not see what better instruction I can give a new prince than the example of Duke Valentino’s ac
tions.” I will not apologize for this judgment, but I will defend it, first noting that I composed my little pamphlet after we Florentines had lost our republic and our libertas, and, in fact, all Italy had become much as it remains today, prostrate before foreign monarchs and their armies—as Valentino himself warned. And because principalities and other petty fiefdoms now far outnumber republics in this Italy of ours, my intention was to write a short work on principalities only, without considering that a republic can secure the common good to much better effect than any prince or monarch, however accomplished; this I take up at much greater length in my Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy.
My object in The Prince was to show defeated Italy a model of her savior, a man as perfect in the bold acquisition of power as Michelangelo Buonarroti’s great marble David is a perfect illustration of the human form and divine spirit. Just as Michelangelo did not portray David the murderer and adulterer, I did not represent the entirety of the man I took as my model. Instead, upon the blank page that Valentino presented all of us, I invented my own rare man: a leader of prodigious gifts, unerring judgment, fearless ambition, and profound insight into the ways of men. This Duke Valentino became my own artfully crafted deception, toward a good end: the salvation of Italy.
I am certain that Valentino himself foresaw this, when he made me his witness. He knew that I would hold my own mirror to his face, and transform him into a hero whose example would live long after his corrupt flesh and evil designs had gone to the Devil. In truth, over the years, I have come to believe that Valentino intended me to read his confession to the Duke of Gandia’s murder, and it was for this reason that he summoned me to the pit. That page torn from a schoolboy’s geometry, however fatal to his own ambitions, was for him a sacred scripture, his book of Genesis. In the beginning, he had not waited on either Fortune or his father, but alone had plotted the mappa of his fate.
Nevertheless I would be a hypocrite not to anticipate that the good intentions I brought to The Prince will also be the root of some other man’s evil, if only because the way to the house of the Devil is the same for the good man and the bad—and the journey just as necessary for them both. The times change, but the nature of men does not. Such men as Valentino will only find our new age more favorable, and they will tell us that their evils are only necessities of the times. But they will linger in the house of the Devil, savor his vintage, and acquire a taste for it.
Just before I left Rome, I received a large package from the Fugger Bank, containing the pages bundled here but no other word. I did not read them until I returned home, to sit in the library I had inherited from my father, that tiny room on the second floor of my house being the sanctuary most sacred to me. I can only say that my tears, like Damiata’s, are still to be found on those pages. Her words revealed to my intellect what my soul already knew: she had been false only when the fate of her son was at stake. In all other matters, both of the heart and the mind, she had been entirely faithful to me.
In the same manner, Damiata kept her final promise; thereafter, I never saw or heard from her again. Even so, for years she stood at every street corner, glided across every sala grande, peered from windows in every city and town. I was certain I saw her at a performance of my Mandrake in Florence several years ago—although in my mind she has not aged as I have. Yet her Giovanni would now be—now is, I pray—nearly the same age I was when I fell in love with her.
But fleet time obscures nothing, only sharpening my memories. I keep my promise to Damiata every day, not just the one afternoon she was content to claim. Soon enough, I will look for her in the next life.
And in truth, she has never left me. Without her abiding presence in my soul, I might have become the Machiavelli of The Prince—I needed only Valentino to take me there—but never the Machiavelli of the Discourses, and certainly not the Niccolò of the Mandrake and the Clizia. Without her love, I never would have learned how to love Marietta. Damiata led me to the higher spheres, the brighter light, and showed me the great power of love over all else in this sad world—although I know that you and all my gossip-bench gang are weary of hearing that canzone.
So here I finish my account of those beautiful and terrifying deceptions that inspired—and became—The Prince. And I leave you with this one truth, which governs all the affairs of mankind: Although Valentino believed otherwise, there is no grand design that can defeat Fortune’s eternal caprice. Only Amor can defeat Fortuna.
Only great love, as I was told in a lifetime so long ago, can journey beyond the shores of fate.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Research for The Malice of Fortune began with the eight volumes of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Tutte le Opere, or Complete Works (including fifty-two diplomatic dispatches from his mission to Duke Valentino), as well as hundreds of personal letters, a number of these referring in detail to his time in the Romagna and the dramatic denouement at Sinigaglia (now Senigallia). All of the major events in The Malice of Fortune are described in these letters and dispatches, which also offer considerable insight into the Florentine secretary’s admiring but wary relationship with Valentino, his frustration with his own government, and his troubled marriage—as well as his repeated requests to colleagues in Florence for a copy of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.
Machiavelli’s personal correspondence reveals a lifelong fascination with courtesans and actresses, and his sole vice seems to have been a succession of transporting love affairs he confessed to his friends with florid enthusiasm. His kindness to an abused mule is derived from one of the last letters he wrote, shortly before his death in 1527, when he advises his son Guido to treat a young mule that has “gone mad” from overwork by removing its bridle and halter and letting it go “wherever it wants in order to regain its own way of life.”
The notion of Machiavelli as history’s first forensic profiler is based on his unique approach to analyzing events and the men who shaped them, a method unprecedented in its psychological emphasis and penetration. Machiavelli described his technique for “querying” historical figures in a 1513 letter: “I enter the courts of the ancients where … I am unashamed to converse with them and ask them the reasons for their actions, and they in their humanity answer me … I transport myself into them entirely.”
Leonardo da Vinci left a similarly voluminous if considerably less organized record of his life, comprising thousands of notebook pages that were arbitrarily compiled into “codices” after his death. The eclectic clutter of his studio is attested by his own inventories; his mappa of Imola is presently in the collection of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle; and in the summer of 1502 he remarks in one of his notebooks that Vitellozzo Vitelli has promised him a treatise by Archimedes. Both Gian Giacomo Caprotti and Tommaso di Giovanni Masini are well-documented members of his household. All of the details of Leonardo’s anatomical and scientific work, as well as his concepts and terminology, are derived directly from his notebooks. I have also made an original addition to Leonardo’s biography, surmising that his dreadful fascination with vortexes began as a four-year-old, when he witnessed a two-mile-wide tornado that devastated a large area of his native Tuscany in August 1456. And, of course, I offer an explanation for one of the great mysteries of Leonardo’s life: After decades of seeking a patron capable of realizing his visions, why did Leonardo abruptly leave Valentino’s court at the pinnacle of the latter’s ambition and power?
Damiata is mentioned in contemporary accounts as the mistress whom Juan Borgia, Duke of Gandia, set out to visit on the night he was murdered. “Madonna Damiata” was investigated as a suspect in the crime, but faded into obscurity as the pope’s inquiries into his beloved son’s assassination mysteriously came to an abrupt yet indeterminate conclusion. Her lively, erudite character is based on such famously learned courtesans as Veronica Franco and Tullia d’Aragona, as well as Pietro Aretino’s Dialogues, a saucy skewering of Rome’s early sixteenth-century courtesan culture.
Zeja Caterina is based on a Roma
gnole witch and healer named Diamantina, who was interrogated at great length by the Inquisition in 1603. Many of the details of Romagnole witchcraft or stregoneria, including the Gevol int la carafa and the use of a textbook as a “book of spells” to impress illiterate clients, are derived from the transcripts of this and other contemporaneous witch trials in the Romagna. The use of narcotic ointments to induce the witches’ “night flight” or “goat ride” is referred to in numerous Renaissance-era sources—among them Giovanni Battista Porta’s Natural Magic—along with specific formulas and detailed descriptions of the resulting hallucinations and motor impairment.
Valentino’s character remains as enigmatic and challenging for the novelist as it was for his contemporaries, who had great difficulty reconciling his messianic leadership qualities with the sinister rumors of his private life. Crimes against women or lower-status men were seldom remarked upon by sixteenth-century observers, so we are mostly informed of Valentino’s prominent male victims. Beginning with the death of his brother in 1497, he embarked on a personal killing spree that included at least a half-dozen other high-profile victims whose elaborately plotted murders far exceeded any practical necessity or political utility. Valentino enjoyed playing cat and mouse with his victims, sometimes sending them on carefully contrived errands or seeing that they were warned that their arrest was imminent, then waiting weeks or months before finally springing his trap. From the accounts we have of various executions, he preferred to visit the condemned for a valedictory interrogation, then withdraw to a concealed place and watch while Michelotto administered the garrote.
The Malice of Fortune Page 40
